Countless hours, weeks, months has gone into this project. It all began in the beginning of 2016. Frank and I had a lot of discussions about consistent performance and how to optimize while keeping consolidation ratios in mind. At the time, I was working on a NFV platform that was plotted on a virtual datacenter and Frank was working on his epic NUMA content. It all led to the idea of writing down our findings in a book.

It is almost like going against the current; we were looking into ESXi host behaviour, while the world is advancing to higher services running on top of vSphere. Why even bother about the hypervisor? It is all commodity after all, right? Well… not per se. It is all about understanding what you are doing on each level, not about just throwing hardware at a performance/capacity requirement. We began to talk about our ideas to our peers to see if they were interesting and feasible to include in a book.

We quickly came to the conclusion that there are a lot of unknowns when it comes to tuning your virtual environment to accompany distributed services like vSAN and NSX, latency sensitive workloads and right-sizing your VMs in general. We hope our book will help vSphere administrators, architects, consultants, aspiring VCDX-es and people eager to learn more about the elements that control the behavior of CPU, memory, storage and network resources.

I am extremely grateful that I was part of realising this book. It is really inspiring to work closely with Frank. He has a tremendous way of expressing his train of thought and has a lot of experience in creating tech books. Our discussions about tech or general topics are always a blast.

All our effort led to our (and my first) publishing which contains:

122.543 words

5217 paragraphs

23 chapters

569 pages

311 screenshots and diagrams

The main challenge was to dig deep in the world of host resources while working a very busy day job at my beloved customers. The effort required was immense. Think a VCDX path times 10. At least, that is how it felt to me. But it was so much fun. I remember a few weeks ago; We were working on the last storage content until deep into the night, like we did almost every day for the last few months, and we were still so psyched at 3.30AM. So even after a very intense period, we still got the kicks out of talking about the content and book in the middle of the night!

We tried to keep the price as low as possible to allow everybody interested in it to be able to buy it. We feel we managed to do that even though the book contains 569 pages. The digital book will following after some PTO and both VMworlds.

As discussed in a previous post; We attended several VMUGs to talk about content included in the book. We are now also confirmed to have a ‘part deux’ of last years VMworld top 10 session this year in Las Vegas and in Barcelona (session 1872). We really look forward seeing you there! Please let us know your thoughts on our book, even write a review on Amazon if you will. It is very rewarding to hear it helped you in some way. Thanks!